Dissent of Member Robin Gross to CCWG-Accountability Report as .pdf (18 February 2016)

Dissenting Opinion of Individual Member Robin Gross on the Issue of GAC Over-Empowerment, Marginalization of Supporting Organizations

While the majority of recommendations included in the CCWG-Accountability Report for Work Stream 1 mark significant and laudable improvements for ICANN’s accountability processes, the proposal remains flawed […]

By: Dr. Milton Mueller, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Public Policy

September 15, 2015 – Full Article as .PDF
1. The IANA Transition
On March 14, 2014, the United States government announced its intention to end its direct role in overseeing the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) and IP address allocation. Those aspects of global Internet coordination, […]

Amending ICANN's existing corporate bylaws to create a community veto process and a board recall mechanism could empower the ICANN community to over-see the direction of ICANN's board of directors. These bylaws revisions would greatly aid in the organization's effort to be accountable to the community it serves without requiring a radical re-organization of ICANN's legal structure.

A group of twenty-four civil society organizations and individuals today submitted a joint statement regarding a proposal from an ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) sub-group on the use of geographic names in top-level domains. The joint civil society statement cautioned against the adoption of the GAC proposal that would give governments veto power on domains that use geographic names. The submission stated that the proposal would threaten to chill freedom of expression and other lawful rights to use words in domain names, stifle innovation, and undermine the multi-stakeholder model for Internet governance. The group also stated that the proposal is based on flawed presumptions of law and 'the public interest' and is entirely unworkable from a practical standpoint.

>> PRANASH PRAKASH: Shall we start?
Good morning. Thank you for coming by for this panel on ICANN processes and privacy issues.
My name is Pranash Prakash with the Yale Information Society project as well as with the center for Internet […]

Stand Up For Internet Freedom! Send a comment to ICANN to express your concern about the organization's radical proposal to hand control of the board of the directors over to governments. The Internet Needs You to Act Today!

This draconian proposal to change ICANN's bylaws would fundamentally transform ICANN away from being a "bottom-up" and "private-sector-led" organization and into a governmental regulatory agency by changing the GAC's role from "advisory" into "primary decision maker" by essentially creating a "governmental veto" on all key organizational decisions. This would mark a truly significant change in the overall power structure at ICANN that would dramatically empower national governments (some democratic, some authoritarian) over the management of critical Internet resources at the expense of those who participate in the bottom-up policy development process...